Many types of consumer electronic devices (“CEDs”) can acquire and consume digital content. One type of digital content is media content, which is any image, video and/or audio content, along with any instructions relating thereto (for example, applications such as games), or any combination thereof, stored or distributed using digital techniques. Commercial media content (for example, movies, television shows, music, and the like) is referred to herein as “program content.” Sometimes program content is protected from unauthorized uses, such as copying, in accordance with one or more digital rights management (“DRM”) techniques. DRM-protected program content can be distributed by a variety of providers or network operators via a wide variety of wide-area and local-area networks. In many cases CEDs are able to interact with networks, and even other physically or virtually local CEDs, to receive and consume DRM-protected program content from a variety of sources almost anytime, anywhere they happen to be.
Advertising content is another type of digital content. Advertising content (in the form of media content such as audio/visual content or non-audio/visual content) embedded within program content broadcast over-the-air has traditionally been a source of revenue for entities in the broadcast programming supply chain. As advertising techniques have advanced, however, advertising content has also been adapted to support the business models of many other program content distributors, such as movie studios, cellular network operators, hosts of wide- or local-area network-based media distributors, cable network operators, streaming or broadcast media distributors, and others. For example, in some environments it is now possible to transmit advertising content separate from program content, target advertising to specific groups or individuals, implement interactive advertising features, and replace out-of-date advertisements with up-to-date advertisements.
Although advertising content and program content often share the same distribution channels, advertising content is often consumed differently than program content—while users generally actively seek to discover and consume new program content, they often attempt to avoid the consumption of advertising content. As such, program content providers and advertising content providers share some common interests and some divergent interests. For example, both program content providers and advertising content providers desire to ensure that attackers do not alter or replace distributed content. Program providers, however, are generally concerned with reducing the likelihood that users of CEDs will illegally over-consume or copy/share program content, while advertisers would like to ensure that users do in fact consume advertising content, and may be very happy if that consumption is excessive or if advertising content is copied or shared.